Saturday, April 21, 2007

Color Mix

So I think spring might actually be here. I am leery, though, of fully accepting it. That last nor'easter lasted a week, drove rain in around our windows and left the canal a funny color brown. But we are not in the flood zone, so all is well. We haven't been down to look at the river, I'm sure it's very high.

Today it is sunny! And promises to be warm :) Nice. (Update: We went to the river and it is indeed high, it looks like it might have gotten almost as high as the "100 year" flood we had a year ago! The debris from the water could be see way up past the walkway, sand covered parts of the path and had ripples from waves sculpted into it. The river is normally a good ten feet below the path! But it is 70 and bright blue skies.)

I thought it might be interesting to show my polymer clay color mixing results. I am prone to take it for granted, color mixing is one of my strengths. I try not to use polymer clay straight out of the package with a few exceptions; the obvious black, white and gold, but also brown, they make lovely browns! But many polymer clay colors are too bright or too translucent for my needs. So here is a series of pictures that show how I mixed a particular green. I will try to show these from time to time because I think it might surprise some what goes into a color. (ie the red I used to get my nice spring green.)

The first pic shows how I took the very bright green and toned it down (by adding red) and warmed it up (by adding yellow) and made it more opaque (by adding white)... ...with this result. It's hard to see in these photos, but the mixed green is less neon looking and more opaque than the original. But it's still not quite what I want. The third image shows what I added when I wanted to take it a step further... ...and the fourth pic is the final result, which you can see I used in the bottom pendant below!

What a nice thing you did, show the process. And the end result is a loverly green. And the pendant, well, like I said above, gotta check out your shop. My mother-in-law needs a mother's day present, and I'm sure she must be tired of my things. Or maybe you'll have a pendant I can incorporate into a piece. My mind is rolling.